Some businesses have a need for providing fast access to company information to employees in the field, e.g., sales professionals, purchasers, executives and the like. For example, a professional uses customer information and service information stored on a customer relationship management server which is also stored in a laptop to execute the services for the customers. The professional generates documents and inquiries that are sent to the customer relationship management server. However, at times, an existing or new field application requires additional objects from a third system, such as an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. By using the dedicated middleware alone, it is not possible to support the required data exchange of additional data from the third system because the middleware is designed to work only between the dedicated server application and field application. The middleware cannot replicate data with a third system; meaning the following functional features, such as a capability to pull data from another system, capability to determine deltas, or changes, capability to the pulled data, capability to perform a key mapping between the involved systems, and capability to handle data with specific formatting, such as documents formatted for transferring the data for a business transaction including data change pointers originating from the third system, are missing.
Field or mobile applications, such as a mobile subscriber application, exchange data with dedicated server applications using dedicated middleware. The mobile service application may be a mobile function hosted on a laptop-based application, for example, used by a service technician working in the field and providing services to customers. The field, or mobile, application acts as a channel to exchange data with an application server, such as a customer relationship management (CRM) application. Functionalities in the mobile application extend some functionalities provided in the application server to a user of the field or mobile application. To exchange data between the mobile application server and the mobile application, middleware functionalities may be used.
At present, available methods do not appear to support the required the data exchange with additional data from the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system using CRM middleware alone. In available methods, the CRM middleware is designed to work only between the CRM server application and other applications. Technically, it is understood that the CRM middleware cannot replicate with a third system. For example, such functional features as a pull mechanism, key mapping service, delta compare service to compare deltas on pulled data and intermediate document handling may not be available via such a system.
It is generally not feasible to replace the mobile application middleware (used by the mobile client) fully because of the existing functionalities and landscape dependencies of mobile clients on the present mobile application middleware. Accordingly, a need exists to develop a solution that provides the functions which overcome the above and other limitations of the described mobile application computing environment.